Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff delivers the keynote address at the beginning of the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on October 14, 2025.
Jessica Christian | San Francisco Chronicle | Getty Images
sales force is powering its Slack app with generative artificial intelligence to help users find relevant information and sort through the communication clutter.
After announcing plans to bring generative AI to its virtual assistant Slackbot in October, Salesforce announced Tuesday that it will now be available to Business+ and Enterprise+ Slack subscribers.
“Slackbot lives inside Slack, so it understands your conversations, files, channels, and the people you work with,” the company said in a blog post. “We always respect user permissions and access controls and only see what users can see.”
Slackbot supports Slack, Salesforce, google drive, box, atlassian Confluence and other services. It uses Anthropic’s Claude model, but Salesforce is testing alternative models, co-founder and head of technology Parker Harris told CNBC.
The artificial intelligence boom has lifted the fortunes of technology companies from chipmakers such as: Nvidia and broadcom to internet giant googleWall Street remains skeptical about what the future holds for Salesforce and other enterprise software companies, and whether some will eventually be forced out. Salesforce stock is down 18% over the past year, while the Nasdaq is up 24% over that period.
Harris said large language models and the many popular coding agents currently running on top of them are not disruptive to cloud software. Additionally, services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are not built into enterprise systems.
“People who say, ‘Oh, now I can code up Slack and Salesforce and AI will do everything for me’ are crazy,” says Harris, who has been paying attention to Slack in recent years. Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021 for $27.1 billion, its largest acquisition ever.
Since the introduction of Slack in 2014, the Slackbot digital assistant has been able to send automated messages to people with updates from third-party services. But with all the chatbots that have appeared in the past three years since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Slack has been a relative laggard. Google and microsoft We already offer an AI add-on within our Business Productivity bundle.
Across the software industry, companies are embracing models like OpenAI and Anthropic in hopes of improving client productivity and driving growth. Apart from Slackbot, Salesforce sells Agentforce services for automating customer service and other business functions.
Harris said the new Slackbot will help her prepare for meetings and research topics.
“I’ve noticed that I don’t use search as much,” he said of the app’s search function.
Slackbot was developed after two Slack engineers looked at how CEO Marc Benioff could use internal tools instead of intuitively opening ChatGPT and uploading internal documents like revenue scripts.
“He’s doing everything on Slackbot now,” Harris said.
A spokesperson said Slack is now used by millions of people in thousands of organizations and is one of the company’s fastest-growing cloud services. Slackbot was the earliest feature introduced in Salesforce’s 27-year history, Harris said, adding that he expects people to switch from Microsoft Teams to Slack and that companies may start retiring their ChatGPT subscriptions once they understand ChatGPT’s capabilities.
But the talent is heading in a different direction. In December, OpenAI hired Slack CEO Dennis Dresser as the startup’s chief revenue officer. Rob Seaman, formerly Slack’s product chief, has been named interim CEO of the division.
Demetri Salvaggio, vice president of customer experience and operations at business travel software company Engine, said he’s been testing Slackbot’s new features and uses it to do a “sanity check” on himself at the end of his workday to make sure he hasn’t missed any important messages. Engine has licenses for Google’s Gemini assistant and Anthropic’s Claude, but they are not integrated into the company’s Slack environment, Salvaggio said.
He said Slackbot probably saves him 45 minutes to an hour a week.
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